An example of an analogy used by a scientist to explain a scientific idea:
"The processes of life have a close analogy to those of a chemical factory, only here, instead of the materials being poured from one reaction vessel to another; the individual molecules diffuse from one enzyme to the next, the rates are fixed, and a number of them circulate in these cycles, making use of a certain fraction of the available energy of the reaction, to reverse the entropy gain. As Schrödinger has said, life consumes not food, but negative entropy, and it is able to do so by the existence of what are effectively solid structures in the protein molecules themselves. It is with the establishment of any one such chain of reactions where complex molecules can be fed in at one end and simple ones liberated at the other, with a net energy gain, that we may imagine that living processes started."
J. D. Bernal (1951) The Physical Basis of Life, Routledge and Kegan Paul
Read examples of scientific analogies
Many examples of science analogies are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.
